ABSTRACT
Monitoring the performance variations in any solar energy conversion device using the Internet of Things (IoT) is one among the trending research area. The solar dryer is a solar energy conversion device which makes use of sunlight to dry food substances with moisture. This work focused on developing IoT-based performance monitoring system for solar dryer. Performance rate of the solar dryer is directly proportional to its absorber plate temperature and surrounding ambient temperature. The IoT-based monitoring system proposed in this study is capable of monitoring variations in such an absorber plate and ambient temperatures related to the dryer experiment. To study the accuracy of the IoT-based solar dryer monitoring system, a comparison with experimentally (manually) measured hourly temperatures is attempted. Such comparative results indicate that the solar dryer process monitored by IoT-based system is in good agreement with manually observed methods with a response time of only 10 seconds. The overall accuracy of such proposed Internet of Things–based solar dryer performance monitoring system is 97%.
